Artificial Intelligence — A friend or an enemy?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) — The first thing that comes into our mind being an Indian is ‘Robot’ movie , right? And that’s true also because if we can create a machine which has brain and can think like humans, that’s AI. The best example that we can have from our real life is Self-driven Tesla Cars . Tesla cars have a vast mechanism , from using AI to take it’s own decisions like when to accelerate and when to apply brakes or take a turn , Neural Networks to recognize images on a real time data and much more. The video below explains working on Neural Networks and AI in Autopilot mode of Tesla . The one term I didn’t talk about is Machine Learning (ML). Will be explaining it ahead.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/images/careers/autopilot/network.mp4
AI VS ML
There is a very thin line between AI and ML. Although ML is only an application or you can say a part of AI. As we already discussed that AI has the power to think like humans but ML is a method in which machines learns from the data that is provided by us. Let’s Clear it with an Example , There is an intelligent student . We gave him a book of Science of 8th standard for self study. He came back few days later and we asked him few questions from that book , he would be able to answer all the questions but if we ask questions from 10th standard book then he might not answer a single question because he hasn’t trained himself for that book. That’s how ML works , they can perform a specific task in which they are trained by humans.
Now , I have heard most of the people saying that Siri , Alexa or Google Assistant are the best examples of AI that we use in our daily life. I don’t believe that , they can be a part or system of AI that might be used in their functioning but they are not complete AI machines. They work mainly on Natural Language Processing (NLP, that is used to convert voice into text and vice-versa) which works on human command. You must be bored of these technical and confusing terms no now let’s jump to our title. What’s the future of AI and is it a threat to humans?
If we talk about the most erudite person of this field , yes of course Elon Musk , he asserted that AI will be vastly smarter than any human and would overtake us by 2025. He described AI as existential threat to humanity . That’s why he has established a company named Neuralink that is working on AI-based chip that will be infused in human brain to make them more efficient and powerful than AI. As per earlier claims, this chip will be able to restore lost eyesight , hearing and limb movement and other brain disease. It also claims that it enable humans to perform simple tasks without physical movement like operating your phone, typing on keyboard etc. If you have watched an Indian superhero movie ‘Krish3’ then you might recall it’s villian ‘Kaal’ doing the same thing. This may sound stupid but that’s the perfect example that suits Neuralink’s claims.
This an art of fiction but what if we could do it in real. Let’s see how it goes as Musk has claimed that this chip will be ready to be installed in humans within a year. Although Elon Musk also has a company Open AI that is working towards fabricating AI based devices ensuring that they will work in benefits of humanity. So this claim depicts that AI can be developed to serve humans and not to harm them. But who seeks the control over this. Any governing body , No. One more question that arises here is that can AI build further AI. If it has brain like humans and if human can create AI then why AI can’t further develop and create itself. And if that happened the control will not be in human’s hand . Then either AI works constructively or in destructive mode , humans will lose control over this. And that’s why I believe Elon stated that AI can be a threat to humans where I would like to add more ‘if it went out of control from human and started constructing and updating itself’ which I think I completely explained above. If a human can create a machine which has brain like us so it means that machine is also capable to build another AI based machine which can either work for us or work against us. And if those machines started working against us , then do we have a power to stop them, do we have brains to stop them. I don’t have it’s answer but Musk clearly says that no , we don’t have such power as of now.
The most advanced AI based robot , you all might have heard about is Sophia, developed by Hanson Robotics’ in 2016. Sophia is a social humanoid robot that can think , talk , behave , act , interact like humans and explains her purpose to be working to develop technology. So why some people consider AI as threat or enemy as it has not harmed us in any way.
According to Elon and many others, AI has not reached to it’s potential yet and there is a lot of deep research remains to be done which will make AI much more smarter and intelligent than humans. Frankly speaking , no one has precise idea what it will bring for us in future but as of now it is helping human to a core extent and fabricating a lot of strenuous tasks in effort-less and easiest way possible. But AI is a vast technology having an immense scope which needs a lot of exploration and no one can deny that it can outstretch to a point where it will be immeasurably more advanced and smarter than humans.